Making the most of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction in your library, bookstore, and reading group

Making the most of the Andrew Carnegie Medals
             for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction in your
                  library, bookstore, and reading group
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction recognize the best fiction title and
best nonfiction title for adults published the previous year in the U.S. The awards offer you programming
opportunities, help you highlight outstanding titles, and can encourage your patrons to read books recog-
nized for their excellence by a selection committee of library professionals.

There’s huge general national interest in these awards—ALA and Carnegie Corporation’s initial announce-
ment in March 2012 was picked up by more than 100,000 news, general media, and social media outlets,
and the awards garnered over 451,000 web mentions in 2014.

The two winners are picked by library professionals who work with adult readers from a shortlist of six ti-
tles, in turn picked from the previous year’s Booklist Editors’ Choice and RUSA’s Collection Development
and Evaluation Section’s Notable Books List. These lists in themselves offer a wealth of further reading sug-
gestions to keep you busy!

Generate excitement in your community:
Use your social media channels, websites, newsletters, and other communications to share the news of the
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, and have people tweet using the
#ala_carnegie hashtag to join the wider conversation. As well as your own information, it might be helpful to
include a link to ala.org/carnegieadult where people can find background on the award as well as useful
links.
The links to the publishers’ web sites (often including reading guides) offer detailed information, discussion
questions, and insights on each title.

                                                                                        #ala_carnegie
                                                                                    ala.org/carnegieadult

Create displays of the winning and finalist titles in your library:
Use the free bookmark, postcard and display handout in the “Resources” tab where you found this overview
to enhance your displays. You can also use the annotations for each title as listed below and quotes from the
Booklist reviews.
Want to enhance your summer reading program? Our experts have compiled a list of read alikes for the
2015 shortlist for readers to enjoy! Not enough time to read? Don’t forget the audiobook editions!
The 2015 shortlist read alikes were selected by the Reference and User Services Association’s (RUSA) Nota-
ble Books Council, which is comprised of expert readers’ advisors and librarians that work closely with adult
readers.
Award seals for the covers of any winning and finalist books you include in your display are available from
the ALA online store. For questions regarding other uses of the images of the seals or medals in displays,
please contact permissions@ala.org or Mary Jo Bolduc, 312-280-5416.

Fiction Finalists
              Through the intertwined stories of a sightless French girl and a German soldier, Doerr masterfully and
              imaginatively re-creates the harsh conditions in WWII-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military
              occupiers.
              More information about the author/book. Read the Booklist review.
              If you liked All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Scribner), you may also like…
                   Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Back Bay Books, 2014)
                   A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (Hogarth, 2014)
                   Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Vintage Books, 2010)
                   Tamar by Mal Peet (Candlewick, 2008)
                   The Invisible Bridge by Julia Orringer (Vintage Books, 2011)
                   In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
                   Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (Vintage Books, 1997)
                   Lisette's List : A Novel by Susan Vreeland (Random House, 2014)

              As young Fan searches for her missing boyfriend in an America devastated by climate change and a pandemic,
              Lee brilliantly imagines extreme survival tactics, psychological trauma, and the resurrection of art and its solace.
              More information about the author/book. Read the Booklist review.
              If you liked On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead Books), you may also like…
                   IQ84 by Haruki Murakami (Vintage Books, 2013)
                   Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (Harper Perennial, 2003)
                   Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Anchor, 2004)
                   Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Random House, 2004)
                   In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster (Penguin, 1988)
                   Blindness by José Saramago (Harvest Books, 1999)

              In Tóibín’s remarkably subtle, witty, and affirming story, the Ireland of four decades ago and the conundrums
              women faced are beautifully evoked through events in the three-year widowhood of forty-something Nora
              Webster.
              More information about the author/book. Read the Booklist review.

              If you liked Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (Scribner), you may also like…
                   The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan (Steerforth, 2014)
                   Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell (Vintage Books, 2014)
                   The Green Road by Anne Enright (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015)
                   The Love Object: Selected Stories by Edna O’Brien (Little, Brown and Company, 2015)
                   The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor (Penguin, 2003)

Nonfiction finalists
             Kolbert combines travel adventures, lucid science, and informed and awestruck descriptions of natural
             wonders, from rainforests to the Great Barrier Reef, to forthrightly address the deleterious impact our use of
             fossil fuels is having on the very fabric of life.
             More information about the author/book. Read the Booklist review.

             If you liked The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt), you may also like…
                 The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman (W. W. Norton, 2014)
                 Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould (W. W. Norton, 1990)
                 The Fate of the Elephant by Douglas Chadwick (Sierra Club Books, 1994)
                 The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen (Scribner, 1997)
                 Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester (Harper Perennial, 2005)
                 Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott ( Spiegel & Grau, 2012)
                 The Next Species : The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
                 Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben (St. Martin's Griffin, 2011)

             Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama, delivers a passionate account of the ways our
             nation thwarts justice and inhumanely punishes the poor and disadvantaged.
             More information about the author/book. Read the Booklist review.

             If you liked Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (Spiegel & Grau) you may also like…
                Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom
                 by Barry Siegel (Henry Holt and Co., 2013)
                Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean (Vintage Books, 1994)
                America on Trial by Alan Dershowitz (Grand Central Publishing, 2005)
                Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's, 2005)
                I am Troy Davis by Jen Marlowe and Martina Davis-Correia; with Troy Anthony Davis (Haymarket Books, 2013)
                Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted
                 by Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck (New American Library, 2003)
                The Wrong Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution by James S. Liebman (Columbia University Press, 2014)
                Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

             Pulitzer-winning journalist Wright presents a riveting blow-by-blow analysis of the historic 1978 meeting be-
             tween Egypt and Israel brokered by then-president Jimmy Carter. A moving testament to the art of diplomacy
             that almost invites optimism, even as prospects for peace in today’s Middle East dim.
             More information about the author/book. Read the Booklist review.
             If you liked Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright (Alfred
             A. Knopf) you may also like…
                 Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds (Basic Books, 2009)
                 King's Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East by Jack O’Connell (W. W. Norton & Co., 2011)
                 1967: Israel, the War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev (Picador, 2008)
                 Menachem Begin: A Life by Avi Shilon (Yale University Press, 2012)
                 Blood of Abraham by Jimmy Carter (University of Arkansas Press, 2007)
                 The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace by Aaron David Miller (Bantam, 2008)
                 America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East by Hugh Wilford (Basic Books,
                  2013)

About the awards
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Web site: ala.org/carnegieadult

These awards were established in 2012 to recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers
published in the U.S. the previous year, and are ALA’s first single-book awards for adult trade fiction and
nonfiction. Just as the Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz awards are uniquely respected in youth literature,
the strong library connection sets these awards apart. The finalists and eventual winners reflect the expert
judgment and insight of the seven-member selection committee of library professionals who work closely
with adult readers. Nancy Pearl has been chair of the selection committee for the first three years of the
award.

The awards are co-sponsored by Booklist and RUSA (ALA’s Reference and User Services Association), who
provide the longlists of selected titles from the previous year’s RUSA CODES Notable Books and Booklist’s
Editors’ Choice. The awards are funded through a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York in recogni-
tion of Andrew Carnegie’s deep belief in the power of books and learning to change the world.